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Facing a budget deficit after opening its International Modern style addition in 1968, the Memorial Art Gallery started charging admission for the first time on Feb. 15, 1969: 50 cents for adults, 25 cents for children.
Fifty-seven years later, a deficit of another kind has prompted a reversal. Beginning next year, admission will once again be free. The move feels acutely necessary in a time of rising prices and belt-tightening, says Sarah Jesse, the museum’s Mary W. and Donald R. Clark director.
“It’s resonating now more than ever, given that people are really feeling the pinch,” she says.
MAG’s Free for All, Forever fundraising initiative has raised $9 million to make it happen. Leading gifts came from Doug and Abby Bennett, the Sands Family Foundation, Mary Ellen Burris, and Alexander and Lucy Levitan. Free admission will start next spring to give the endowment time to cook.
“I want to make sure that we don’t go back on our word, that we can promise forever,” Jesse says. “And the (most responsible) way you can really promise forever is by setting up an endowment.”
Jesse joined the museum as its eighth director in February 2024. She brought to the position more than two decades of experience in American art museums. Before coming to Rochester, Jesse was director of the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Md., and she previously served as deputy director, interim director and CEO of the Orange County Museum of Art.
When she first proposed free admission at MAG, Jesse took a philosophical standpoint: As a civic institution, the museum has an obligation to make art accessible to everyone in the community. With adult ticket prices at $20 and children $9, admission was out of reach for many.
“I could see this museum was an amazing civic treasure, a great resource that, for the people who used it, was a very impactful part of their lives. But there was this whole segment of the population who did not have a relationship to the museum because of the financial barriers that are in place,” she says.
“I felt like the museum made a lot of gestures to the community that they wanted to invite the community in—symbolic gestures like a land acknowledgment when you walk in, public statements about how the museum is inclusive,” she says. “And yet there was this glaring contradiction to me of this $20 admission fee, especially in a city like Rochester that does have significant poverty.”
But Jesse also has a finer economic point to make: Ticket revenues accounted for less than 2% of MAG’s operating budget that totaled $11,061,382 in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025. They fall under earned revenue, a category that includes other sources such as special events and educational programs and generated a third of all revenues. The museum’s endowment contributed 26%, and memberships and gifts brought in 21%. The top two expense lines were support services, 34%, and facilities, 20%.
“If we have 100 visitors or one visitor, it still costs us the same amount of money to open the doors,” Jesse says.
“Artwork is not diminished the more people look at it,” she adds. “You can have a million people look at a painting, and it’s not a resource that dwindles every time someone looks at it.”
69th Clothesline is this weekend
Close to 400 vendors will be showing at the 69th M&T Bank Clothesline Art & Fine Craft Festival this Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 29 and 30, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., on the Memorial Art Gallery grounds. That’s 70 more than last year, with 120 new vendors, live music, food trucks and the festival’s own beer, courtesy of Strange Bird Brewery. Tickets are $5 (free for members), which includes admission to the gallery. The juried festival is held in the sculpture park.
Attendance—the museum had 163,190 visitors in 2025—is expected to double. The endowment will make up for lost ticket revenue and added expenses that come with more visitors.
“People acknowledge it’s a choice to offer free admission, but it’s also a choice to charge people to come in,” Jesse notes. “Our building is 124,000 square feet. We don’t need to limit our attendance. I want everyone to be able to use the civic treasure that was actually designed and built for the citizens of Rochester and beyond.”
MAG was founded in 1913 with a gift to the University of Rochester from Emily Sibley Watson in memory of her son. She wanted URochester to have some governance (URochester owns the building and the collection, and contributes about 18% of the budget), but stipulated MAG would have its own board with fiduciary responsibility. In this way it is different from most community art museums that are affiliated with a university.
A world of art
Free for All, Forever is part of a wider effort to retool how the gallery carries out its mission to “connect people, inspire fun, and ignite discovery.”
Encyclopedic museums like MAG have collections spanning thousands of years. (The museum holds 13,000 works of art, from ancient civilizations to today.) They haven’t always been inviting places for everyone, generally reflecting the eurocentric interests and ideals of the collectors and historians who built them at the turn of the last century. The rest of the material was “other”: homogenized as non-Western, exotic curiosities.
That’s why museums have a reputation of being elitist, Jesse says.
“You can say that you are an inclusive institution, but if you’re telling the story of American art only from the starting point of European settlers, for example, and ignoring the rich indigenous traditions that were there prior, then you’re missing this whole truly inclusive lens through which you can be looking at art history.
To that end, European curator Nancy Norwood is also in charge of Asian art and antiquities. American curator Jess Marten also covers African and folk art. Contemporary art curator Timothy Peterson searches for artists and perspectives underrepresented in the collection. Endowments going back to 1930 fund all of the museum’s acquisitions.
“Every single encyclopedic museum battles this,” she adds. “All of us are trying to think of ways to change our actual practices in the kind of work that we present.”
“All three of them know their collection areas really well, so they have a sense of these egregious gaps that we want to fill, or a strength of the collection that we really want to grow even more,” Jesse says. “All three of them are trying to do that original research to uncover who are the artists who’ve been left out of the art history canon.”
The museum will be originating more of its own shows. An upcoming solo exhibition will spotlight Maria Oakey Dewing, a respected early 20th century painter whose work has flown under the radar. Marten will gather all of Dewing’s known works from museums around the country for a show in 2028.
That includes several by her husband, figure painter Thomas Dewing, that are in the gallery’s collection. Marten’s research will be the first to give Dewing co-credit for the floral backgrounds she painted in her husband’s works but did not sign.
Inclusivity is woven into programming too, with community classes in the Creative Workshop, camps, school tours and performances for all ages. A collaboration with the Rochester City School District, funded by MAG, brings students in grades 2 to 4 at five partner schools for multiple creativity workshops over three years.
URochester medical students come to the museum for a required program that uses art to hone observation skills and to reflect on how biases shape what they see.
“Just the other day we had all the first-years come, and we had 150 people scattered throughout the museum,” Jesse says.
Thursday night and Sunday performances on the Italian Baroque organ in the Fountain Court, by Eastman School of Music faculty and students, remain popular after many years.
A place of inspiration
MAG’s campus became more embedded in the surrounding Neighborhood of the Arts in the 2010s when much of the iron fence along University Avenue was removed to develop Centennial Sculpture Park.
One of the first things that struck Jesse when she visited the gallery before applying was the park.
“I think it is the most successful sculpture park I’ve ever seen,” she says. “I’m not being hyperbolic.”
She had just visited another sculpture park sited on a flat parcel, covered in graffiti, screaming neglect. But at MAG, landscape architect Mark Bayer had created an immersive art experience by siting the sculptures in a garden setting of undulating landforms, with paths curving through lawns and hardscapes that bring visitors from one sculpture to the next.
People come to the park to do park things: ride their bikes, walk their dogs, take pictures, do yoga. Jesse envisions extending the space around to the back, so that the minute visitors step out of their cars, they too are in the park.
She also wants to bring the same immersive experience into every corner inside the museum—which is not one but five structures, built in 1913, 1927, 1932, 1967 and 1986, and cobbled together.
Some spaces in the museum “break the spell of this inspiring place,” Jesse says, and are overdue for improvement: removing carpeting, raising low ceilings, painting walls, replacing 1960s lighting. One space in particular has caught her eye: Jesse wants to open up floor-to-ceiling windows on the first floor that were covered up years ago. (“It kind of feels like a basement, but it’s actually not the basement.”)
Upgrades are part of an important formula: Museums work best when the art is in physical spaces that are beautiful themselves, she says. Like the landscape in the park, they should match the quality of the artwork.
“This signals to visitors that you are entering into this elevated realm of ideas, and that this is a place of inspiration,” she says. “It takes you out of your day-to-day.”
Last year was MAG’s best ever in terms of donations, which were up 188 percent year-over-year, Jesse says, and this year is tracking the same way.
“We have tons of momentum right now because on one hand, success begets success, but on the other hand, I think in times like this, people are looking to civic institutions that are making a difference in the community, and they want to support it,” she says. “And I think people see MAG as playing a very important role now more than ever.”
Sally Parker is a Rochester Beacon co-founder and a contributing writer.
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While praises are being sung for the MAG, their involvement with the notorious Tom Otterness shouldn’t be allowed to be swept under the rug. For those unfortunately unfamiliar with this unsavory incident, in the late 1970s, seeking to make a name for himself as a video artist, Otterness adopted a dog from a shelter in Colorado, tied it up, shot it, and filmed the dog’s death agonies. The final work of “art” being presented to the world under the cold, but accurate title of the, “Shot Dog Film”. A lack of public awareness of Otterness and his activities allowed his egregious act to fall into oblivion. But not total oblivion.
By the 2010s Otterness had gained enough of a reputation to have his more traditional work sought by various municipal organizations. Commissions were received from, among others, New York, San Francisco and Lincoln, Nebraska. However investigations in each city uncovered the existence of the “Shot Dog Film”, leading those customers to cancel all of part of his commissions.
Enter the MAG. While the issues with the above cities were unfolding, the Powers That Be at the MAG, apparently well-aware of Otterness’ background, nevertheless handed him a fat commission in 2012 to produce cutesy statuary for their new Centennial Sculpture Park. When word of Otterness’ past indiscretion finally made it into the local public conciousness, and questions began to be asked, the MAG raised the PR drawbridge and told us that they had no issues with Otterness, that his actions were those of a young person (he was 25), and that anyway he had apologized. How the dead dog reacted to the apology was never made clear. All-in-all their explanation was unconvincing to say the least. It was also the prelude to dead-as-a-shot-dog silence on the subject. A silence still in effect 14 years later.